“Definitely comic”: The genre that Pearl Jam thought was a complete joke
No member of the grunge movement was guilty of taking themselves too seriously whenever they played. All of them may have taken their lyrics seriously whenever talking about their internal pain, but there was a common consensus that everyone from Nirvana to Soundgarden did see any kind of distance between themselves and the audience whenever they came onstage. If bands like Pearl Jam ended up seeing a few partists that crawled up their own asses, though, it was going to be noted.
Before PearlJam had even formed, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had already been taking the piss out of rock and roll in Mother Love Bone. Andy Wood had all of the charisma of any great frontman, but there were also some elements that were clearly a mockery of common rock and roll tropes. No one expected to get famous, so the least they could do was have some fun while they played in small clubs.
Even Mike McCready noticed that kind of energy when he saw Mother Love Bone live, saying, “[Andy] would play it like he was in a coliseum. He would yell, ‘To all the people in the back,’ and there’s just the guy at the door.” When Wood passed away from a drug overdose, it was clear that whatever Gossard and Ament did afterwards was going to have to be completely distinct from their old band.
They still managed to play rock and roll, but with Eddie Vedder at the front, his brooding baritone made them stand out next to everyone else. This was still the era when singing the highest notes possible was the equivalent of great singing, but since Vedder was completely original, it was refreshing for people to hear songs like ‘Alive’ and ‘Why Go’ when they started performing them in clubs.
If anything, it was the best medicine from what metal had become over the last few years. The hair metal scene had started off promising in the early 1980s, but by the time that Pearl Jam hit it big, the genre needed to die, with everyone except Guns N’ Roses looking like a parody version of what a record company thinks a successful teenybopper band is supposed to sound like.
“We thought metal was pretty much a joke at that point, but we also knew that it was an area where we could get some fans. Headbangers Ball and Rip magazine, all that stuff.”
Stone Gossard
And while Gossard did like his fair share of heavy riffs, he couldn’t deny that the whole thing had become ridiculous, saying, “We thought metal was pretty much a joke at that point, but we also knew that it was an area where we could get some fans. Headbangers Ball and Rip magazine, all that stuff. You’re going to do whatever you can to get it going. We made an ‘Even Flow’ video that never came out that I’m sensitive about, because it was my idea. It ended up being totally rawk: lots of big lights, out on a cliff, definitely comic to look back on now.”
It’s not like Pearl Jam and Nirvana were directly responsible for killing the genre, either. The documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years is practically an autopsy for the genre as a whole, to the point where it’s easy for some people to get repressed by it if they look at someone like Chris Holmes from WASP sitting in a pool drinking vodka for too long.
Since that was all that fans had to look forward to in rock and roll, getting to hear Pearl Jam and Nirvana was almost a blessing. They had been fed nothing but disposable pop trash for the past few years, and this was the musical equivalent of an exterminator clearing out all of the unwanted vermin.
